The present disclosure relates to a vibration generating apparatus.
A vibration generating apparatus, converting electrical energy into mechanical vibrations using the principle of the generation of electromagnetic force, has been mounted in mobile phones, or the like, to be used for silently notifying a user of call reception by transferring vibrations thereto.
In addition, in accordance with the rapid growth in the market for mobile devices such as mobile phones, or the like, several different functions have been added to mobile devices. Further, mobile devices have been required to be compact while being high quality.
In accordance with this trend, the necessity of developing vibration generating apparatuses having novel structures capable of overcoming disadvantages of existing vibration generating apparatuses and significantly improving quality has increased.
Further, recently, in many markets, mobile phones have been replaced by smart phones in which a touch screen scheme is adopted. Therefore, the use of vibration generating apparatuses, provided for the purpose of generating vibrations at the time of a user touch, has increased.
In addition, a vibration generating apparatus using a piezo-element has recently been released. Such a vibration generating apparatus, using the principle of an inverse piezoelectric effect to generate displacement, by applying a voltage to the piezo-element, generates vibratory force by moving a mass body of a vibrator by the generated displacement.
In the vibration generating apparatus having such a structure, a frequency bandwidth capable of obtaining a predetermined level of vibratory force is wide, such that stable vibration characteristics may be implemented.
However, since a piezo-element should be relatively long in order to secure displacement and vibrations, a length of the vibration generating apparatus is increased and the vibration generating apparatus is vulnerable to damage in the case of impacts when being dropped.
That is, such a vibration generating apparatus has an approximately rectangular parallelepiped shape and a relatively elongated form, such that it may be difficult to miniaturize such a vibration generating apparatus, and such a piezo-element having an elongated form is easily damaged due to external impacts.
Therefore, the development of a structure allowing for the miniaturization of vibration generating apparatuses and preventing damage to piezo-elements has been demanded.